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- Hacker News
- It's awesome. I moved to France from Portland, Oregon this year. I went from 1gb to 8gb fiber for half the cost in France.by audidude
- That's a pretty interesting move. Any other experience you are willing to share about France compared to Portland? I'm actually curious and have always considered Oregon to be one of the nicest places in the US.by ricardobayes
- Currently typing this from my vacation house in France, in a rural area, with vineyards nearby. Closest highway is a 45 minutes drive (!). Now, sure, it is a fancy place in that it's Provence's seaside and, well, I can see big yachts from my couch but it's still in the middle of nowhere. At night it's wild boars (which my cat hates), snakes (which my wife hates) and toads everywhere.
It's a very sparsely populated area, we're kilometers away from the nearest village and indeed we've got fiber to the home (since years and years already now).
Now it's not all rosy: they filter traffic/block IPs/force website to imposes checks (like age checks) that aren't done elsewhere, block torrents, etc.
I'd say it's the least open Internet I've seen in any EU country (now of course there's VPN and I can use a SOCKS5 proxy through ssh to one of my server etc. but still: France are complete control freaks and it shows).
- Using DNS over HTTP instead of the ISP's DNS solves most of these blocks, for now.by rtsil
- > they filter traffic/block IPs/force website to imposes checks (like age checks) that aren't done elsewhere, block torrents, etc.
Is that with Orange (France Telecom)? I don't have such issues with Free.
by UncleSlacky - Spain is worse, to prevent illegal soccer match streaming they ban a ton of IPs during matches. So tons of hosts (like Cloudflare) become inaccessible. And that's managed by a private organization. In France I'm not aware of any ISP that even blocks torrents, though there is hadopi so you can get a fine. All blocks I'm aware of are DNS only, so trivial to bypass.by juliie
- I have 5 Gbps symmetric fiber in NYC with a Google Fi data only sim as a built-in failover to 5G on my router. It did require some specialized hardware, but it's truly a wonder coming from a kid that experienced dial up.
It really changes the calculus on some things with large volumes of data on my desktop. Admittedly, my desktop maxes out at 2.5 Gbps, but everything else in the house keeps happily chugging along.
by ZeroCool2u - get a 5Gig network card if you have a spare PCIe or M2 slot on your motherboard. should be about $30.by ishtanbul
- Is that fiber to the property or fiber to the cabinet? In the UK I get FTTC which means the last bit from the cabinet down the road to my house is copper wires. My speed is bottlenecked by that. New builds and flats get services for the building giving them full fiber. My fiber is only as fast as my copper wire to the cabinet allowsby harel
- But that's already so much faster than ADSL. I just got "Fiber to Home" last year and frankly the only difference I could see is when I download a big file with a torrent. I am convinced that direct downloads and web pages were already limited by other stuff that the bandwidth.
Also that's kind of irrelevant because it is free/cheap to get the ISP to pay for bringing fiber into the home (at least if you are in an urbanized area ? But if not, the paragraph above still applies)
by cassepipe - I think FTTC is just called (V)DSL in most places. IME it's uncommon to call anything less than FTTB (basement / building) fiber.by ahartmetz
- When I moved a couple years ago and got fiber with Virgin they came and pulled fiber from the cabinet down the road to the house, with no extra charge.by have_faith
- There are a few places that had cable before mainstream fiber deployment (so FTTC), but the norm in France for new installations for at least the last 10 years has been FTTH (including in the countryside).by nehalem501
- It is FttH (fibre to the home)by 1e1a
- France doesn't have much FTTC, VDSL and HFC exist but are fairly rare.
Orange has started decommissioning its legacy copper network.
by hocuspocus - There is an official European Union goal to achieve 100% Gigabit network coverage for all European households by 2030. While it does not exclusively specify fiber-to-the-home (FTTH), fiber is the primary technology utilized to meet this standard, which requires networks to deliver speeds of 1 Gbps and above. It is underpinned by Regulation (EU) 2024/1309, known as the Gigabit Infrastructure Act (GIA).
https://eur-lex.europa.eu/EN/legal-content/summary/2030-digi...
by donalhunt - I was curious and just looked it up: Germany reached 36.8% in 2024 (https://www.bundesnetzagentur.de/SharedDocs/Pressemitteilung...).by dewey
- Germany is planning for 2035. Everything is now pushed to 2035 - rail infrastructure , digitisation, removal of fax as an official method etc.by tchalla
- And in places where FTTH is available, you pay more for 250/100 Mbps than symmetrical 10 Gbps in Switzerland.by hocuspocus
- Not sure if I'm surprised negatively or positively by the fact. My apartment (Germany) was built in 2017 and coax in every room was the choice planners made :_)by nixass
- We can all thanks Free who pushed massively fiber to no longer be dependent on Orange's ADSL copper network
And also the fact that they have crazy low prices which forced the 3 other ISPs to stay competitive
by EDM115 - Xavier Niel did a lot of good to Franceby aennassiri
- Yep... was on the countryside for the Summer in places so small they didn't even have a bakery, which in France matters.
What did they have though? Optic fiber, high bandwidth, low latency, reliable and for a very low price.
Honestly I think ADSL was already enough for most people, I mean non professionals, but now I think France has the infrastructure for a good enough Internet for the next few decades. I can't fathom normal usages that would need higher bandwidth and lower latency.
by utopiah - Bakeries are long gone in small villages which are out of main roads. You better be prepared to have a car to get your bread or to make it at home.by dolmen
- The "sad" thing is that it is generally not advantageous for people to have both a phone data plan and an internet box plan if the latter is not shared so a lot of people have a fiber connection on their wall but still use their phone as hotspot since bigger data plan < reasonnable data plan + internet box plan
It's not the end of the world but it feels like a wasted effort. I don't know what the solution is.
by cassepipe - by halestock
- What an absolute clown car country, embarrassingby sicktriple
- I hate the state intervention here. But let's not pretend the track record of the status quo was great.
This intervention is embarrassing and corrupt. Infrastructure in america is also embarrassing, which I'm guessing is also some combo of corruption and self-inflicted wounds on state capacity.
by chermi - “Unfair to slower technologies”. Insane statements like this would make the government in Orwell’s 1984 blush.by Mistletoe
- Reminder that US taxpayer money was handed to the ISPs by the truckload on the promise of fiber. They took that infrastructure money and ran with it.